Robin Hood: A Visual Development Project

Monday, October 17, 2011

Robin Hood has always been one of my favorite (semi) fictional heroes. I
first fell in love with him as a fox and later learned to love him as suave and
debonair actor of the silver screen.
I love him in literature, and I absolutely love him in art.

(However, I am on the fence with him being an ex-gladiator just come back from the
Crusades, impersonating a knight and planting fields at night with stolen
seed.)

So
when I say that this project has been a long time in the making, I really mean
it. I came up with the idea of
setting Robin Hood in the future way back (good grief, that’s actually true,
now) in high school, but the characters have been with me for far longer. I’ve worked at it off and on throughout
the years, applying things I’ve learned, letting the characters and story
mature and develop. Lots of things
have changed, some things haven’t.

When
I was in college, I was introduced to a really great book called “The Skillful Huntsman” by my good friend, Jenny, and a huge piece of this idea fell into
place. The Huntsman is a class
project done at Art Center College of Design in California. They took the Grimm’s fairy tale and
did a whole semester’s worth of visual development for the story as if they
were going to turn it into a game or a movie. The book is full of the students’ character designs,
settings, machines, everything you could think of that had a significant impact
on the story. Anyway, I looked
through this book and the first thing I thought was: “I should do this for my
Robin Hood Project”.

After
that, everything just started to feel right. It was the visual development and production design that had
always been my interest and focus anyway.
I love the bones behind a story – the pictures that no one ever sees but
always have such a heavy impact on the final product. And then I started thinking, what if I could share that
background process with everyone?
All the snippets, all the edits, let my “audience” (such as it wasn’t) in on the whole creative process!
How would that work? Could
you present the information and the story in such a haphazard fashion and still
have it make sense?

And
so this site was born.

It
still hasn’t hit me how much work this project could actually be – and
hopefully for all of us, I’ll be too far along with the creative pieces of it
by the time I realize the enormity of it to be able to turn back. But in any case, this blog is dedicated to experimentation
and adventure, and I really hope you enjoy the journey as much as I do.

About Me

Artist, illustrator, and certified lion-tamer-in-polar-regions. Working on grizzly certification. Sara writes a bit and makes illustrations of the fantastic - whether from her imagination or from her favorite stories.